Biblyon Broadsides

I’ve just added Pocket Gods & Monsters, a very simple web app, to the reference sheets section of Gods & Monsters. It currently only has two screens: one for ability modifiers, and one for difficulty levels/obstacle size penalties. I expect to add one or two more reference screens, and, assuming I can figure in-browser SQL storage out, the Spirit Manifestations database.

I’ve tested it on a first-generation iPod Touch, and on desktop Safari and Firefox. It should work in any “HTML 5” browser. If you use Javascript it will remember which screen you were last on, so that if you have to quit and go back in it comes right back to the table you were previously referencing.

You can add Pocket Gods to your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad application screen by choosing the bookmark icon (probably a “plus” symbol) and choosing “Add to Home Screen”. Since iOS supports HTML 5 manifests, it will download all of the required files, allowing you to use Pocket Gods while offline.

This is a web app designed by a Luddite. I’m still a big fan of paper maps, real dice, and hand-drawn character sheets. Pocket Gods is meant to be a quick reference; it will never replace the rulebook or real dice, nor will it ever create a character for you. The only thing it might replace are the three-fold reference sheets; however, paper remains more versatile than mobile devices, so I’ll continue to update the three-folds for the foreseeable future.

For the same reason, I expect to continue using physical adventure books for quite a while. Until the immediate visual cues of paper bookmarking across multiple pages and multiple books are matched by ebooks, it’ll still be easier to run an adventure from a physical book.

I can almost see replacing paper adventures with ebook adventures on a large screen; a 27-inch iMac has enough space to keep several pages open at a time, all visible. But I don’t think I’m going to be carrying a 27-inch computer to gaming sessions. When will we have our promised holographic projectors? That’s the point where I’ll start seriously thinking about replacing all of my paper manuals with ebooks.

Of course, it’ll have to be a holographic projector that can’t be seen by the players…

Eugene Ritter of the Cave of Chaos has a couple of rules for what can constitute an old-school game. One of them: can you start from scratch and create a character in 30 minutes without much knowledge of the game? He puts Gods & Monsters through the sieve and it comes up 2 minutes ahead of schedule.

His second test is whether or not a player can create a character in 15 minutes if guided by someone who has already played the game. I’d add that it also should work if that “expert” is also currently playing a game: does the game have to stop while a new character is rolled up. Results are currently mixed, but I’m working on it.

I’ve got another test, but this isn’t about whether it’s old school but whether it’s playable. Can someone who hasn’t played under the writer understand the rules?

Close. Eugene’s character is fine. But his article about verve, survival, and injuries seems to read as if a character’s last heroic effort is about staying alive. I went back to the rulebook, and damn if it doesn’t sound exactly like that:

When a character’s time runs out, they will die by the end of the scene they’re currently in. At any point between when the character starts dying and the end of their final scene, the character can make one heroic last effort. The player will gain a bonus of their level on that roll; their injuries will not apply. They may bid any remaining mojo on that roll. Other players may also contribute mojo to that player’s roll, regardless of whether it is archetypal for those characters.

What in that description indicates that their last heroic effort is about dying heroically? Nothing. Let’s try again:

When a character’s time runs out, they will die by the end of the current scene. At any time before the end of the scene, the character can make one heroic last effort to do anything other than stay alive. The player can have the character try to attack the enemy one last time, try to assist their comrades in some way, make a stirring speech to influence the senate—or stir the mob to riot¹.

The player will gain a bonus of their level on that roll; the character’s injuries will not apply. They may bid any remaining mojo on that roll. Other players may also contribute mojo to the dying character’s heroic last effort if they wish to do so. For all purposes, a heroic last effort is archetypal for all player characters who contribute, and each character gains experience and possible skill/field bonuses as if they had spent the full mojo, not just what they personally contributed.

I just finished scanning all of the pieces of the Isle of Mordol island map today. Here’s a rough patch-up of it. It’s kind of exciting for me—despite all the time we played in it in high school, I don’t think I ever saw the whole thing at once. (This may be why many of the sides don’t exactly match up.)

They’re taped together as vertical scrolls. It was always easier for me if the player characters went north/south rather than east/west. On the lower left, you can see that I originally planned to use one piece of tape across the width of the paper; I decided that two small pieces instead would be more flexible.¹

Over on the right, you can see a river, going from the ocean in the northeast, to the ocean in the southeast. That makes it not really a river, but more of a different island. There is no mountain between those two locations.

There is a mountain on the island, though. In the lower left, just west of the city and the empty cove, that white space is a snow-covered mountain range. Given that each paper is about half a mile wide, the entire mountain range is no more than a mile long. Each square is fifty feet; that makes the “mountain” about 600 feet wide.

There was a wide variation of geography on Mordol. That brown stuff on the map is desert. The green stuff is forest. And the diagonal lines are grasslands. Look closely enough, and you might be able to see blue with green slashes. That’s marshland. And the yellow is perpetual fire.

While piecing them together, I notice that it looks a lot like I completely forgot about the roads on the north side of map in E3. They go up—and then they don’t continue in E4.

Props to GIMP for making it relatively easy to put the maps together. It uses up all of my iMac’s 4 gigabytes of RAM and creates a 900 megabyte file, but as long as I quit all open applications it works pretty well. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a 17,840 by 16,538 image before.

I have already typed in all of the text for the island. As soon as I get around to sizing each section of the map and matching it to its text, I’ll put that online, too. It’ll probably go over on Highland Games since it really isn’t anything to do with Gods & Monsters, but I’ll post a notice here as well. Here are a handful of my notes placing the map in perspective:

Oh, man, I love crawling hands. And I love dinosaurs. The latest Fight On! has them both, although I provided the dinosaurs. Kelvin Green provided an awesome illustration of your players running from a dinosaur. It’s like Land of the Lost with fantasy weapons. And there’s a very evocative cliffside by William Buckland, too, that makes me wish they had room to make these bigger.

This one is dedicated to Paul Jaquays, and includes an interview with him covering his time just before working for Judges Guild through his leaving TSR before it folded, as well as working in computer games before and after that. The interview was conducted by Ciro Sacco and Allen Varney.

I’m waiting for my print copy to read things through closely, but here’s what I’m seeing at a clance:

• There’s a strange-looking dungeon called The Hobgoblin God’s Crown by James Quigley that looks interesting, for levels 3-5.
• An even stranger-looking dungeon called The Contemptible Cube of Quazar, by Jimm Johnson and Jeff Lynk, for levels 4-6. It has the most intriguing map I’ve seen on a dungeon yet, I think.
• Caverns of the Beast Mistress, by Tavis Allison, inspired by, and connectable to, Paul Jaquays’s Caverns of Thracia.
• They’re pushing through The Darkness Beneath, with the twelfth-level Blasphemous Shrine of the Tentacled God by Jeff Rients.
• Fiction. I have never seen a gaming magazine do fiction well. I’d like to say that the only exception was The Neo-Anarchists Guide to Everything Else, but, frankly, we didn’t do fiction well either. So I don’t have high hopes for this, but, as I said, I haven’t read it yet. (And that said, I am looking forward to Weird Enclaves and Black Pits, their separate fiction project.)

The front and back cover on this issue excels. You can see them both in the preview at Lulu.com.

Clocking in at 116 pages, Fight On! continues to be well worth getting if you’re looking for inspiration for your game.

Wow cool. Jeff Dee and Jack Herman have finally managed to wrest Villains & Vigilantes from the strangely non-publishing hands of zombie FGU. This has been a long time coming, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

I’m working on a big project with very little payoff, because I’ve been wanting to do it for years now. I’m putting my first, nearly unplayable, megadungeon online: “The Isle of Mordol”, the “fifty-feet to a square magical island” that I mentioned in Order of the Astronomers.

This odd little drawing is part of that project. Any guesses as to what it is?

Fascinating discussion of semi-immersive role-playing in the context of a Shadowrun/Mouse Guard/PTA Frankenstein system over at Story Games Community.

“They want to be themselves and immersed at the same time. Roleplaying is like wearing a costume. It’s just them with some funny clothes. But just because they don’t lose themselves in their character, doesn’t mean they want to be pulled out of the moment to moment action in the fiction they are creating.”

Michael Curtis: “There is a central mystery in the Watchfires & Thrones campaign: A secret whose origins lie in the long-forgotten past and, if revealed, could answer some of the big questions that humanity and the other races ask about themselves. If the answer to the mystery was to become publically known, existence itself might change forever. However, unlike many other campaigns I’ve both ran and played in over the years, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if the players choose to never so much as glance at the clues strewn in their path. They’re simply there to amuse myself.”

I’ve been doing the same thing in our current game. However, due to a misunderstanding with a bean-si, our group did decide to follow some those clues; they were well on the road to the central city before they realized that’s what they were doing.

In both cases, though, what is important is that you as a game master make sure you’re enjoying what you’re doing. If you enjoy putting in weird things that no one is ever going to find, then do it—and then don’t force the PCs to find it. It’s not a failure if some things remain beneath the surface. In movies and books, that’s a sign of depth and marks a story that will be thought about and talked about for years after it’s read. I think the same can be true of game narratives.